Four Poems

May in Micaleshik

What is the point of May in Micaleshik? Only to prove 
that here, the lilacs are solitude’s first flower. The wind 
in David’s harp plays an ode to Yiddish, which no one 
hears. Laughed-at and sobbed-for mama-Yiddish, simple
as the stones once thrown in the raging ghettos 
of Vilna and Warsaw. In the evening, 
the sunset resembles the blaze of 
a public burning. At nightfall, 
the stars light yahrzeit candles 
for the martyrs in the 
ruined alleyways.
My first cry and 
my last kiss—
Yiddish. 
 


On My Street in New York

Long
ago
this ancient
building, weary 
of standing, laid down 
its own death sentence and 
got to work dismantling 
its own bricks. Autumn. The wind tears
the trees’ garments as a mourning rite. 
Hunched, heavy-laden schlepers look for luck 
on beds of concrete in crumbling warehouses. 
The laundry hangs like burial shrouds, the clotheslines 
twist and sway like enchanted snakes. Through iron and dream, 
heaven and steel, the city hauls itself upward. Evening. 
A penny-harlot, a pauper’s plaything, is turned to pure gold 
by the sunset. My fingers grow gray with my longing. On my street, 
even God dies of this endless loneliness. Caught in a spiderweb, 
a butterfly gives her last confession, the vidui of my sonnets. 
 


Clouds over Tsfat

Fall. Tsfat
lies between 
hills, valleys, clouds
and jackals. Long since 
weary of the high skies, 
the clouds have returned at last, 
after much wandering, to their 
grandfather-mountains. Sinfully, they 
pull themselves toward the simple earth, seeking
to make companions of the houses, people,
stones—not in Paradise, but far from holiness
and further still from God. Nostalgic, the clouds insist
that man left the Garden of Eden on his own, and they
call him home, to the tohu va’vohu before creation. 
 


Children of Tsfat

Barefoot
children in 
barefoot Tsfat, mouths
full of delicious 
Yiddish, as if through you 
my shtetl whispered to Tsfat—
I see you as Ponar’s children, 
my companions in Eden, Yiddish 
in your veins, freed from death, fear, and German— 
the earth beneath your feet suddenly heaven.
Isaac the Holy slips from a nearby graveyard 
and follows you, children of Tsfat, in the slow sunset.
Step-by-step, the ancient sage expounds a new Kabbalah 
of mama-Yiddish, where Yiddish herself is the eleventh 

s’firah over Tsfat. Yiddish: grief, joy, dream, truth of my people. 
Look! There my shtetl sinks in the sunset, as if burning 
at the stake. And there, my brother Elijah ascends, 
in his flaming chariot, to the Shechinah—
the Presence of Yiddish. Then, by his lament, 
as if by the name of God, children rise 
from the death-ovens. The crescent moon 
is the thumbnail of a child 
who turns the heavens of Tsfat 
like the pages of some 
starry Zohar, which 
only murdered 
kinderlekh 
can read.